Steve Welsh’s beautiful prints remember football grounds past

If you’re not into football, then I can see why the whole charade of trudging off week in week out to watch a group of overpaid, overhyped prima donnas can seem downright daft. But if you are one of the many who buy into the game on a spiritual level, then you’ll love Steve Welsh’s new project Homesick. One of the by-products of the rampant modernisation of the game in recent years is that many clubs have given up their historic, much loved grounds for brash, shiny and sadly often identikit upgrades.

Steve’s prints are topographic studies of three grounds discarded in exactly this way – Manchester City’s Maine Road, Sunderland’s Roker Park and Arsenal’s Highbury – and in their simplicity lies their brilliance as centuries of stories, of shared experiences, of agony and ecstasy and humour and boredom are all reduced to the grounds’ constituent features paradoxically heightening their emotional impact.

Steve has some other interesting work as well – an illustrated feature on former Celtic player Gil Heron (father of the musician of The Revolution Will Not Be Televised fame), interesting posters and prints and some awesome Sensible Soccer-style animations of famous footy moments.

Steve’s work brings a whole new meaning to the phrase “the beautiful game.”

Steve Welsh: Homesick – Highbury

Steve Welsh: Homesick – Highbury

Steve Welsh: Homesick – Maine Road

Steve Welsh: Homesick – Roker Park

Steve Welsh: Catenaccio

Steve Welsh: Celtic’s Black Arrow for XI The North American Soccer Quarterly

Steve Welsh: Celtic’s Black Arrow for XI The North American Soccer Quarterly

Steve Welsh: Celtic’s Black Arrow for XI The North American Soccer Quarterly

You know what we’re like, always going all gaga over pretty colours and GIFS like little typing magpies. But we’re not all about a pretty picture over here at It’s Nice That; and neither is designer Evan Grothjan. While we admit we were initially drawn in by his vivid tones and abstract compositions, it turns out there’s a lot more to his Spaces series than crowd-pleasing aesthetics. Instead, the images form an ongoing investigation into the relationship between space and emotion; something Evan’s been interested in since studying animation as part of his Rhode Island School of Design course.

The current director of the Nottingham Contemporary gallery, Alex Farquharson, has been announced as the new director of Tate Britain. The 45-year-old founded the Nottingham Contemporary in 2009, launching the site with a show of David Hockney’s work from the 1960s. Alex says: “I am delighted to be joining Tate as director of Tate Britain. As the home of 500 years of British art, Tate Britain has a unique and fascinating position in the cultural life of the nation. I look forward to working with a highly skilled and experienced team of curators to share these histories with audiences of all kinds.”

Tate director Nicholas Serota adds: “Alex Farquharson has established Nottingham Contemporary as one of the leading art galleries in the UK. He has created a programme that serves local and national audiences, working closely with artists and reflecting history as well as the present.” Alex will take up the director role in late autumn this year.

It’s the surreal quality and ambiguity in Los Angeles-based Alex G’s paintings that makes them so interesting. Contorted bodies climb, lounge and bend over pastel-coloured boxes, as though they’ve slipped mysteriously out of reality and into a limbo-like world. The uniformity of the figures adds to the peculiarity of the work, all of them with silhouetted hair and features and dressed in white T-shirts and shorts. Looking back through Alex’s work, it’s his current set of paintings, where he’s drifted away from the fantasy-like details and focused more on the on the abstract and obscure, that are strongest. The artist is set to have his first solo show at The Dot Project, London on 8th October, a perfect chance to see the otherworldly details up close.

Artist Charlie Roberts is based in Oslo, but the energy and dynamism of his work belies the tranquility that I can’t help but associate with Norway’s serene landscapes. His past work dealt almost obsessively with collecting remnants of pop culture and laying them out in orderly lines to be documented, but more recently Charlie has shifted towards cool canvases depicting adolescents lazing about, smoking joints on car bonnets, wrapping their long arms around their friends and watching the world go by. It’s a relaxed portrait of young adulthood – all seductive almond eyes, tangled limbs, Nike sportswear and ripped jeans, and it feels like a sweet love letter to this universal but transitory time.

If your long, arduous week has left you looking a bit sickly and slightly grey in colour, Patrick Savile might well be the man with the cure to pep you up for the weekend. A freelance illustrator and designer with experience working for Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon and Pop magazine populating his back catalogue already, his Personal Zone (real section of his website) is full of abstract, sci-fi-influenced landscapes and textural objects floating bizarrely over fantastical scenes. There – we can see the bright yellow of the screen reflecting off those pallid cheeks already.

After four years of soft detention for Ai Weiwei’s social and political activism, the Chinese authorities have returned the artist’s passport. Ai Weiwei broke the news on Instagram today with a selfie brandishing the travel document. “Today, I picked up my passport,” he wrote in a caption.